Can anything rein in Google?

posted at 8:41 am on July 20, 2012 by Jazz Shaw

By this point it’s not exactly a surprise that Google has invaded pretty much every aspect of your online life, even if you don’t own a computer. (That bird outside your window? He works for Google.) But a recent judgement seems to send the beginning of a message that perhaps the internet behemoth has gone too far.

Google and the Federal Trade Commission are near a $22.5 million settlement agreement related to charges that Google bypassed privacy settings in Apple’s Safari browser to show advertisements, according to a person briefed on the proposed settlement.

The $22.5 million fine would be the largest privacy-related settlement in F.T.C. history. It comes as the commission investigates Google for antitrust violations and cracks down on privacy missteps by tech companies, including Google, which last year agreed to pay for any future privacy blunders as part of a separate F.T.C. settlement.

The settlement seems to revolve around Google’s intentional work to subvert the choice by Safari browser users to not have cookies installed on their machines and have their activities tracked so Google could tailor the ads they saw. They simply ignored the settings. Doug Bonderud referred to the fine as a slap on the wrist, given Google’s cash status. So will this have any effect on them?

I have one laptop which I only use for some client work on which I’ve never logged in to my mail account, or any other personalized settings. I do have a default set of start pages which include The Weather Channel so I can look at the local weather radar while traveling. I also like fishing, so a couple of times I clicked on some links for the local solunar tables or fishing forecasts. Lacking any other link to who I might be or what I might like, the Google ads on their page have since then served up links to articles about fishing and stores which sell fishing gear.

How much is too much? Should the government be stepping in here? I know conservatives normally have a knee-jerk reaction against government regulation, but doesn’t this bother people? It would be nice to think that simple public scorn and “voting with your wallet” would have an impact, but obviously Google has grown far beyond caring about such things. Is this a problem that needs to be fixed or has that ship already sailed? I’d be interested to hear the responses to this one.

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“It would be nice to think that simple public scorn and “voting with your wallet” would have an impact”

It is immaterial to you, as an individual, whether others choose or choose not to use Google. What matters is that you have the choice. If you do, and you do so for a free service, then make your choice.

In the end, that is what conservatives and libertarians should care about.

If you are free to decide, and the government doesn’t hamper free competition (pun intended), then what is there to worry about?

I hate it everytime I see so-called Republicans and conservatives fretting about the issue and getting caught up in the socialist hand-wringing about “we must do something”.

“It would be nice to think that simple public scorn and “voting with your wallet” would have an impact”

It is immaterial to you, as an individual, whether others choose or choose not to use Google. What matters is that you have the choice. If you do, and you do so for a free service, then make your choice.

In the end, that is what conservatives and libertarians should care about.

If you are free to decide, and the government doesn’t hamper free competition (pun intended), then what is there to worry about?

I hate it everytime I see so-called Republicans and conservatives fretting about the issue and getting caught up in the socialist hand-wringing about “we must do something”.

The only real threat to your privacy is the government, by the way.

PrincetonAl on July 20, 2012 at 8:51 AM

Leviathan has grown so large and has been so ingrained in us since birth, that it’s just accepted that something like the Federal Trade Commission should exist. Or that even government should exist.

At the end of the day computers should be seen as a tool. How skillfully you use those tools and protect your privacy is largely up to the user.
Check Amazon and you can find numerous books on how to help do this.

Speaking as a professional programmer, this seems bass-ackwards. The browser is the running program. It loads web pages and displays them. Those pages may contain code, and your browser’s controls should allow you to specify if you want to run web page code or not, and to specify whether and how it’s run.

If Safari has a loophole that permits Google pages to show ads when they shouldn’t, that’s a problem with Safari, not Google.

Sorry to inform you but this has nothing to do with whether or not you use Google. The advertisers on the web pages you visit pay Google. Their AdSense technology reads the cookies (browsing history, etc.) to tailor the ads to you.

The only thing you can do is block cookies but then you loose a lot of the conveniences you’re used to having while on the web.

There are some third party security programs that can help but my guess is that Google already has ways around them.

I use them for what little I need them for, and have since moved to Bing for searches after Google has gone asinine on firearms searches. That may be the final straw for me to up roots and go elsewhere… but frankly if they continue like this, their business model will get a competitor.

Alta-Vista was once the king of the hill for searching. Now its an ‘also ran’.

Microsoft once dominated the computer field, but is now just another player in software.

IBM once dominated the computer field, but succumbed to hubris acting like a country, not a company, and got its lunch eaten by someone it helped to establish.

Google may find that its practices and ‘don’t be evil’ now will come back to haunt it as it is called out as being evil.

There is nothing permanent in the computer industry. Does anyone fear IBM like they were once feared? Or Microsoft? Google is next dominant today but susceptible to the exact, same trends they started. Don’t like the current line-up of offerings and offerors? Wait a few years.

Google has the same sort of vision that Microsoft and IBM had, and it garners the same failings they got… to be large you can’t be good at everything… and soon you are overhauled in places that were once your domain. The first application that can actually search the net for you, and you can own the application and it doesn’t require a server farm will spell the end of the old search engines.

That is less than a decade away. Perhaps far less than a decade away, because your searches will be tailored by you, for you, without you even having to work at it. And there will be more than one venue to get such capability, too. You are smarter and more capable than any company, and when your computing system adapts to your needs, suddenly the need for a behemoth goes away. IBM still exists, greatly transformed and rescoped. Microsoft is still around and profitable, but no longer the titan of software. Alta Vista has faded down to a name. With that as a trend the fate of Google in a few years is none too pretty.

When are our socialist masters going to demand, no, require Google to provide them with all sorts of personal information derived from our internet travels? Visit Hot Air routinely? You might be a threat. Visit Fox News regularly? You are already a threat. Have Drudge as your homepage…shoulda been jailed long ago Contribute to an anti-Obama website…you’ve been tagged.

As they used to say back in the 60′s…just because one is paranoid does not mean that government is not out to get you.

There’s more here than just ignoring the “turn off cookies”. Google was the company that refused to help the US Government when it came to tracking terrorists but willingly capitulated to the Chinese government to track Chinese users.

Google is the company that for years to mistakenly collecting data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi networks using its Street View cars. Google photographed homes from public streets using a fleet of company cars. Google said it was trying to gather info about location, strength and configuration of Wi-Fi networks to improve Google Maps.

In the process the cars were collecting snippets of emails and other I’net activity from wireless home networks if the home network had NOT been secured by passwords.

Google blamed this on a programming error; temporarily halted the Street View data collection and said it would stop collecting all Wi-Fi data.

Was this a Google mistake? I will agree people should protect their home networks but Google has to have some of the best programmers in the world.

Strangely enough, I typically browse with Chrome and I see almost no ads.But then I also run Ad Block, a free Chrome extension.
I have a feeling that Chrome tries to phone home about my activity but I have my firewall set to block that. Bing is my search engine.

I do marketing work for an attorney. One of the ads we purchased and still fund is a remarking campaign. After someone has visited his site, wherever else they go they see ads for his services. I can tell other companies do the same thing — we ordered pizza online last week and now I am getting Domino’s ads. I was looking at shoes … shoe ads. I actually find the creepiest to be when I put something in the “basket” for Coldwater Creek but ultimately didn’t buy it. Then I got ads for that specific item.

Now, I grant you I obviously have cookies enabled. And Google annoys the heck out of me with its account settings, etc. (for google analytics, which I also need). But some of the ads and things you see probably are not from google, but from the couple of sites you visited.

I’m not a huge fan of what google has become (what ever happened to “Don’t be evil”?) but their on-line privacy-probing troubles me a lot less than the fact that increasingly they define history – as in “if it’s not on google, it never happened”. Government control, however, is not a better answer.

That said about their on-line data collation, I think that obsessive probing including photographic (“Don’t like it? then don’t go out in public”), aircraft and satellite overflight (“Don’t like it? Then don’t live above ground”), and electromagnetic-radiation sniffing (“Don’t like it? Then live in the dark without electricity”) does cross a line, whether it’s google or the feds.

No. Absolutely not.
If you want to protect your privacy online (complete oxymoron btw) then you need to purchase software or find free software or (gasp) write your own code, to do it. If that doesn’t work for you, then stay off the Internet all together.

The only vestige of free speech left is the Internet, keep the government out of it.

If Safari has a loophole that permits Google pages to show ads when they shouldn’t, that’s a problem with Safari, not Google.

SomeCallMeJohn on July 20, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Oh, so if granny lives in a neighborhood where some professional burglars also live and her house gets broken into, then it is granny’s fault despite having motion-sensor lights, bars on the windows and big locks on the doors, but not having a guard dog, isn’t that basically what you are saying?! That it is not the thieves fault?!

If Safari has a loophole that permits Google pages to show ads when they shouldn’t, that’s a problem with Safari, not Google.

SomeCallMeJohn on July 20, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Oh, so if granny lives in a neighborhood where some professional burglars also live and her house gets broken into, then it is granny’s fault despite having motion-sensor lights, bars on the windows and big locks on the doors, but not having a guard dog, isn’t that basically what you are saying?! That it is not the thieves fault?!

Are you serious? I’m saying Safari developers should fix their software so it works properly.

There are dozens of free mail, calendar services, plenty of other search options.

PrincetonAl on July 20, 2012 at 8:51 AM

Did you even read the post?

I have one laptop which I only use for some client work on which I’ve never logged in to my mail account, or any other personalized settings. I do have a default set of start pages which include The Weather Channel so I can look at the local weather radar while traveling. I also like fishing, so a couple of times I clicked on some links for the local solunar tables or fishing forecasts. Lacking any other link to who I might be or what I might like, the Google ads on their page have since then served up links to articles about fishing and stores which sell fishing gear.

A set of government regulations now will be written with the heavy influence of the biggest companies- and the end result will probably be to enable those big companies to keep doing what they are doing, while making it incredibly difficult for newer, smaller companies to compete with them.

More government regulations are never the answer.

If you want to have more online privacy do some research and take care of the problem yourself.

I’m hesitant to give government any power they can use to decide which capitalist they want to crony up with then penalize those they don’t. Inform the public. Let the public decide. I quit using google and now use Bing. Let Google hang itself.

I’m generally against regulation when the government uses it to discourage behavior that should be criminal. It then creeps into non-criminal ordinary activities, and pretty soon the government is regulating everything. That’s pretty much where we are right now. We are all constantly breaking laws that are selectively enforced, both criminal and civil.

If Google searches my private communications when I have no business relationship with them, then prosecute their executives and throw them in jail. The wifi snooping thing is no different than breaking into a house and rifling through a desk within, there should be no corporate shield. If, on the other hand, they search my communications as part of a business relationship that I have entered into with them, then there’s no problem. It may make me stupid, but you can’t legislate away stupidity.

There’s a free market solution. Get your own domain –it’s cheap then you can setup your own personal email and use Mozilla Thunderbird (free) to download your emails or use your own domain’s web interface if you’d rather use the browser to check email. If you use the inappropriate protocol you can seamlessly do email on your smartphone or browser while on the road, go home and log in on Thunderbird and not miss an email since everything, folders included are hosted on the server.

The biggest attractions for me is that I can create as many emails as I want (no limit) to give every business or site I interact with their own email address. Example : if I open an account with united airlines, then the adduced I give them will be “united@mydomain.com”. If later I get an email addressed to that addy and it’s from a spammers, I know that either united got hacked or they sold my addy to the spammers. That’s happened a few times and I can decide to stop doing business with that entity (after berating them) or change my addy and block the old (occasionally happens with eBay where a sloppy seller gets compromised).

It would be nice to think that simple public scorn and “voting with your wallet” would have an impact, but obviously Google has grown far beyond caring about such things.

I’ve never used google – not from the very first time I heard about that company. Something about it immediately turned me off and put them in the same category as apple. People do need to vote with their wallets. I don’t want the government sticking their noses in because I trust the feral government about as much as I trust google.

I have ad block and donottrack on my machine. No web site gets any money from me other than being able to count my page views. It isn’t just google that abuses people but most web sites – like this one – which think that someone clicking on its pages gives it the right to assault them with idiotic ads and collect all sorts of data on them. Not true. You have no such right and if you hadn’t abused people like you do I might still be looking at ads, here.

If there are enough lemmings and idiots in the world to support google and obtrusive sites (as there obviously are) then there is nothing that can be done about these companies’ constant desire to invade people’s privacy. Those who like themselves exposed are welcome to do it and try to live off of the lemmings but they will increasingly find that they reach points of reduced returns as people stop all their tracking.

We still have systems that allow us to control what companies do on our computers. Safari didn’t do that but anyone who trusts apple for anything is a fool. ANyone who uses any apple products deserves what they get. In the end, intrusive sites will reduce the overall value of the internet as people block off more and more things. That’s fine and part of natural evolution.

Google is working on cars that drive themselves, just put in the desired location and your car will take you there. This will be an enormous time saver/productivity gain for the US population, eliminating routine driving. (After an night of hard drinking you can just hit the “home” button and pass out– no more DUIs.) Will Google license the technology to our automakers or just buy one? — and put the others out of business!!

Meanwhile GM and company are still trying to build a car that doesn’t burst in to flames when your not looking and has so many contorted controls on fuel burning to making them a nightmare to work on (can anyone say Compressed Natural Gas — no emission controls on gas kitchen stoves!)

For those who don’t know about InPrivate Browsing and Tracking Protection on IE9 … just click on the “Tool” cog, in the upper right of your web page, and after the drop down, place your cursor over “Safety.” You’ll see both InPrivate Browsing and Tracking Protection, and you can use what you want.

I ignore online ads. Commercials are bothersome when I want to view a video. Sometimes I refuse to watch the main video at all. Other times I mute the sound until the commercial is over. Banner ads I ignore. What I don’t like is a pop-up window that’s takes up the entire screen. Even Hot Air has that sometimes. Really, I will not buy your product if you annoy me with your ad.

I don’t mind the ads. What I mind is the intrusiveness of them preventing me from reading a site.

There absolutely IS a way to reign in the googlemonster. It’s in your purse and in your wallet, but more importantly it’s in your computer.

Simply don’t use any more google products if you don’t like their efforts to undermine your decision to protect your own privacy. Don’t click the ads on their site, and don’t use their email and search engine. Whatever google is connected to, disconnect from. Give them the middle finger, don’t make new laws.

If enough people do this to google and every other fascist wannabee organization (cough-government-cough) they’ll have no choice but to operate in a more appropriate manner….at least until some leftist communist president signs an executive order forcing every citizen to wear a google GPS unit and google glasses that show your every movement online while bombarding you with advertisements.

Next up from google, anal and urethral implants you will be forced to purchase and implant because of some executive order the commie in chief will sign.

This is the problem, though: Google actively worked to defeat that protection. That is wrong.

Personally, cookies should be public or private. The browser should be able to distinguish between them before they are stored (and you have the ability to manage/block them), and no one should have access to cookies that are private, except the system that actually placed them there.